In the 16th century, at the height of the
Ming Dynasty, physician Li Shizhen penned

The Compendium of Materia Medica, still
considered the most comprehensive tome
for diagnosing and treating patients using
Chinese herbal medicine. In the 1950s,
provincial health officials established a 3-D
version of sorts of Shizhen’s encyclopedic
work, creating the Guangxi Medicinal
Plants Botanical Garden in Nanning, China,
to showcase, study and preserve more than

7,400 medicinal plants.

Yuk Fai Leung, professor of biological
sciences, believes that this lush garden of

500 acres may hold a key to new treatments
for retinal degeneration, an irreversible
condition that affects millions of children
and adults worldwide.

Intervention Window

“There are not many effective treatments,but the vision loss is usually a gradualprocess, which means there is a significantwindow for intervention,” he says. “Drugsor therapies that could slow the progressionof the disease could allow people tohold onto their vision longer and greatlyimprove their quality of life.”Now, an agreement between Purdue andthe Guangxi Botanical Garden is givingLeung access to traditional herbs whoseactive ingredients could be extracted,replicated and turned into potentialcompounds. He’s also working with the EyeHospital at Wenzhou Medical University tobuild patient-specific, eye-disease modelsbased on a mutation identified in Chinesepatients. And he’s leading a collaborationbetween Purdue, the Joint ShantouInternational Eye Center of ShantouUniversity and the Chinese University ofHong Kong.

Purdue Lab

Together, they have established a laboratory
at Purdue where researchers will use
zebrafish to screen compounds that may
have visual benefits.

“The partnership connects clinical and basic
research so that we can identify a problem
in patients, take it back to the laboratory
for study, develop and test new therapies,
and then bring back a solution to the
patients,” Leung says. “We hope to pinpoint
the compounds in these traditional herbs
that are influencing vision and use them as
a model to create even more effective and
safe compounds for treatment.” | A.R.

CHINESE HERBS, ZEBRAFISH AND THE
SEARCH FOR NEW VISION-LOSS TREATMENTS

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It's over. Of course,
instantly. But the eye keeps on
seeing it there, the high
bright spill. Seeing it there,
and seeing it, what it was like,
that desire …